Breathless
A manic whirlpool of images again assaults Renard as he pulls back through the rift. Like before, he is spat to the earth, and like before, he skids for metres, dirt caking itself down his front and chin. Laying face-down on the mud, he mildly pushes himself up to find himself again at that same lakeside meadow, this time in the company of Fidel and Orpheus, who are also collecting their bearings.
Adrenalin pounds away like a decaying fire. Sudden lightheadedness rattles Renard — Kingslayer is lying on the grass where he left it, only a slight distance away, but still enough for the bond between himself and the blade to tug him. Renard goes to retrieve it.
Fidel snaps into motion. From a satchel that he wasn’t wearing when Renard last saw him, he quickly retrieves a roll of bandages and begins administering them to Orpheus, whose state, now that Renard sees him properly, makes Renard double-take.
He is mangled. Three pronounced gashes run down Orpheus’ body — he has taken a hit from the ghoul’s vicious talons. One runs down his collar, one over his torso, and one through his right forearm, though the last has been mutilated so thoroughly it looks more like a strip of raw rabbit jerky. At the end of that arm is, connected to the wrist by only a tendon, a dangling hand. Orpheus had not been clenching his hand to nurse a bleeding gut. He had been holding his injured wrist stable so the appendage would not fall off.
Further, the blood gushing from his wounds is tremendous. It has already dyed him entirely red. That he could fend off that monster for even a second in this state is a miracle, and that he has not already passed out from weakness is also. But now that there is a moment of safety, as he tries to raise his head, it only flags and wilts like a dying flower.
“I’m sorry," Fidel confesses quickly, his hands moving with surprising speed and practice, “it was my fault. I brought it up there — it was following me…"
Of course it’s not your fault, Fidel. The consolation jumps to Renard’s tongue, as he sheaths Kingslayer and approaches Fidel and Orpheus, but the words do not leave his mouth.
“I’m sorry," Fidel repeats, hands dutifully whizzing even as tears leak from his eyes. “I’m sorry."
Renard bites his lip. The right thing to do is help Fidel apply the bandages, but, more embarrassingly now than it has even been before, Renard is a terrible medic. Though trained in first aid long ago as a guard in Sebilles, the occasions he needed to use that training were few, and his actual ability in it was remedial. His talent has always been in killing, not in mending.
Renard so averts his gaze.
A whispered groan rises from Orpheus, as though he is trying to speak.
“What say you?" asks Renard.
Orpheus breathes, takes a roll of bandage, begins steadily wrapping his own shoulder. To be that strong even while bleeding out… His whole body then shudders and strains, throat bobbing, and as though speaking these words takes as much effort as it would to shove a great boulder, his gravelled voice repeats: “Close the rift."
Message so conveyed, he pulls tight a swath of bandage, slumps and teeters. Renard nods—when bestial screech pierces the silence of the lakefront, and a massive shape barrels out of the rift, glimpses of slime, rodent teeth and talons, swooping in like a crazed battering ram.
Reflex dominates. Renard leaps forth — Kingslayer flashes free, and carved by the beast’s own momentum, through the metal of his blade crowing: Yes! Yes!, Renard feels the cleaving of a great weight deeply in the ghoul’s flesh. An ocean rains of vile blackish-green blood that bursts so thick the sheer mass of the spray blinds like a curtain.
The beast crashes, tumbles, shrieking in unquestionable pain. Embedded deep in its flesh, a grip any less iron than Renard’s surely would have here released Kingslayer — but indeed Renard does not, being instead dragged along with the beast. Without hesitation, he rights himself to his feet and plunges Kingslayer again into the undulating flesh and muscle underfoot.
Another hideous shriek — convulsions, and the ghoul rolls onto its feet, tossing Renard off its belly to the ground.
Now able to see the state of the beast, it is horribly wounded. Even as it looms over Renard, viscera dangles from its stomach, weeping and trailing onto the grass. The vile little eyes in its five vicious rat-faces burn with hatred but also with fear, every one panting seething breaths as if sick. Two of the heads have their lower jaws broken and a third is completely missing. Drool pours from all its mouths, thick and green like snot, but as the rivulets flow, becomes progressively more watery and diluted like the stream of a pure spring river.
The ghoul’s muzzles scrunch and its heads recede as if trying to withdraw into itself, jaws snapping at air in a futile attempt to scour a vile taste off its tongues. Unable to escape own its tastebuds, it confusedly beats its massive wings as if this will help it flee — but its left wing is deeply cut. The vigorous flapping only jettisons more thick pumps of arterial blood out of the beast, and, upon slapping the ground, snaps off its injured wing.
Rage and pain flash in its eyes. Confused, damaged, and sick, desperation screams to it that the only escape now is through attack.
Renard braces. The ghoul dives for him, talons outstretched. Artfully, fruit of years of ceaseless experience, Renard ducks under those talons as if dancing, lands a cut on a forelimb as it passes overhead, and, spinning, plunges Kingslayer into the beast’s chest. The rat-ghoul reels, screeching. Its heads in unison all snap at Renard, pushing over each other like chicks squabbling for a meal, but Renard loops his strong arm around the neck of the nearest head and is again ferried into the air. The ghoul bites itself, over and over, trying to reach him. Renard flexes his arm — a great ‘crack’ resounds as that neck of the beast breaks, and falls limp.
The other heads surge in relentlessly. Renard plants Kingslayer into the crown of an oncoming skull, which whips backwards in pain. Swiftly, Renard alights onto the monster’s back, its talons passing just a moment too slow in reaching up to rend him apart. Two quick slices, two heads lopped off, thoomping onto the earth.
Its remaining necks twist — its talons reach further for him, but the weight of its own muscles is now too much to bear. The monster flags and slumps to the ground, its arms wandering like poles tilting in the wind. Its thrashing tails, dissolving in their own purified mucus, wither and snap apart.
Shluck, shluck. The last heads fall. A final, desperate spasm rocks through the beast, and then nothing.
Victory is pregnant in these moments after slaughter. Renard breathes in deeply, the taste poignant in the air.
“—ah! AAAAAAAH!"
“—Fidel!" Renard gasps.
Snapping out of the haze of triumph, Renard whips back around to the source of that bloodcurdling scream: Fidel. He has been swept several meters from where he was treating Orpheus, his trail writ in a swath of bloodsoaked meadow.
The ghoul struck him, in its first charge, and the manner of ‘how’ remains grisly and obvious. The lower jaw of the ghoul that snapped off is here, lodged by the incisors deep into Fidel’s calf. But even as jets of blood shoot out onto the grass, it is not the pain or the severity of the injury that is making Fidel scream with such primordial horror.
Rather, it is the mass of writhing, slimy, eel-like tentacles that have burst out of his leg. Knotted and intercorded akin to the ghoul’s tails, they balloon out from each other in interweaving spirals, ripping open Fidel’s pant leg and spreading airward in a fat helix, panickedly — for they are moving not with the will of a foreign aggressor, but by the will of Fidel, and they are not a parasitic intrusion, but Fidel’s very flesh itself. Raw injured red muscles weave and melt together into another smooth sludge-black strand of the mass, the open wound disappearing under the slime-layer as blood thickens, blackens, and clots like jelly.
It does not stop there. Quick as serpents, streaks of black upon his skin rush up along his thigh, accelerating, as wildfire, outlines of the coming shift with their volition plainly clear, that to his torso, to his crown, every inch of flesh will turn in seconds, until Fidel Asphodel is nothing but a quivering mass of black eels.
Renard sprints — as does Orpheus. Hatred spears through Renard’s heart. Orpheus! What does he think he’ll do! But Orpheus is the one already nearer, and the one who reaches him first. He skids onto his knees and sets his good hand upon Fidel’s leg.
Now what, now what shall you do! But just as quickly as Renard thinks these unkind words, a shift comes to the motion of the eels — they compact, and retract, as if wilting…
“Close the rift!" Orpheus yells to Renard.
Awareness that Orpheus is healing Fidel sweeps aside his resentment. Renard nods, without an inch of falter, adjusts his stride, shoots like an arrow instead for the unassuming face of the rock-ledge, the flank of the invisible loom.
In a motion practised thousands of times, Kingslayer sings out of its scabbard.
Time freezes in that instant where Kingslayer’s tip bites into the loom.
There is resistance, of a strange sort. Where before motion slowed and became heavy in proximity to the barrier, here the motion and the swing flow smooth and uninterrupted, but upon the contact of Kingslayer to the barrier, all the world simply pauses. It is not that there is a force preventing Renard from moving; indeed, there is not even fear of being stuck, or room for conscious thought, but merely airy perception. The subsequent end of the swing will continue perfectly fine. It is simply that this one single specific moment has been picked apart from the sequence of time, as if for inspection, and inevitably will be returned to it.
Rather, the natural consequence of this action, whatever that may be, is truthfully already in place, and in a strange way, has happened.
Though all the world holds still in this painted moment, the barrier quivers. It is the quiver of knowing what another is thinking; the quiver of witnessing intention rise up from the soul to the mind. But where should be a considerate mind to steer the course of this juncture, there rises at the wheel only a profound absence of captains. Governance is ceded to the blank mindless will of the barrier itself.
Which is a ridiculous prospect, as much as would be ceding to a stone the decision of whether or not to be hewn. Before the actioned will of Renard, and the unconquerable might of Kingslayer, the barrier soon buckles, and like nothing…
Time resumes. Shards of the barrier rain over the world as, like nothing, it shatters. Renard stumbles only now with the odd interruption of the temporal judder, tailing the end of the smooth swing, a step into the grass that was formerly blocked, to quickly regain his footing.
The shards that rain are like glass, and burst out in all directions. They are invisible, but their presence is obvious and can be felt in the gut, again in the same way as glass. Unlike the scar that was the rift, however, the edges of these shards do not cut or burn, and there is no sulfurous glow about them that hurts or bleeds into the air. Exactly as Pleione said, the loom has been broken.
And with the loom broken, the glowing rift itself shatters too. The globs of glowing, injured, bleeding air all run together to one distant nexus, and, in the scurrying motion of a fish released to the sea, dissipate as the intangible shape they were cut upon shakes them off of its body and hurries along into the current of space, free, as is its natural will to be. Indeed, not a second passes after that behemoth leaves than does the last particle of light dim into nothing, and the uninterrupted fabric of night overhead smooths beautifully healed and even again.
Renard releases a short, relieved breath, and turns to rejoin Orpheus and Fidel. He does not make it two steps before a subtle tremor comes over the earth and the sky begins to shake. That long ribbon of distorted space he first saw when inspecting the barrier whips about like a leather belt shot off from a centrifuge, cramping and shattering and falling and unfolding with an insane momentum, and a streak of black sweeps over the sky so absolute that it swallows the stars.
And everything flips — the curtain sweeps too underfoot, then arcs overhead, carries the meadow, and slides underfoot, yanks the horizon, sweeps overhead, the entire vista revolving in somersaults around the trio of Orpheus, Fidel, and Renard. It is like they are standing stable in the hollow centre of a spinning ball, whose movement is only growing more quick and erratic, and whose every rotation further distorts the environment. Like an oil painting, defaced and melting, so the meadow shears apart, and like a snowball charging down a hill, accumulating greater and greater size, more and more scenes of foreign places flash and whirl in and out of the land, their conjunctions disorderly.
Soon the vistas blur so quickly together they cannot be seen. All of this happens in only a second.
In the next second, that raging snowball settles. It does so smoothly like it is confused, and pausing, why had it ran with such strength? Then the first ribbon of black distorted space again snaps, shooting away from the bounds of the large orb it drew around the three men, to fly off into the dark like a gnashing dragon, rippling along, with greater concerns than them, and blinks out of sight.